Creativity & Compassion: Spalding Writers Celebrate 20 Years

Kathleen Driskell is the author of numerous books and poetry collections, including Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Rattle, Appalachian Review, and many other literary magazines. She is chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Katy Yocom's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Salon, The Louisville Review, decomP magazinE, Midlife at the Oasis, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry has been translated into Bulgarian. Her novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and was a finalist for the Dzanc Books Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize and the UNO Press Publishing Lab Prize. Katy is a 2019 recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence from the Kentucky Arts Council. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Elizabeth George Foundation as well as writing residencies from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Crosshatch Hill House. She holds an MFA in writing from Spalding University, co-directs the Spalding at 21c reading series in Louisville, and serves on the board of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She lives with her husband and animal companions in Louisville, where she is associate director of Spalding's low-residency MFA in Writing program.